Retro gaming emulation: SheepShaver

I’ve written about SheepShaver a few times on the blog, but generally in passing. Today seems like a good day to acknowledge this software for the miracle it is.

Computers are simultaneously the most advanced and the most fragile thing humanity has invented. There’s no guarantee that a piece of software more than a few years old will actually still work (well, there’s no guarantee that any software will actually work, but there we are). And yet, a German programmer has created an emulation environment that actually works and runs classic Mac OS software.

The latest version has a weird crash on my late-2016 MacBook Pro, but setting the memory allocation to 512MB seems to fix that. So far, I’ve successfully played Lode Runner, Abuse, the Ambrosia shareware apps, Indiana Jones and His Desktop Adventures, and various CD-ROM titles (the latter on my older MacBook Pro at home, which still has an optical drive). Oh, and Reagan’s Watching (above), which I dimly remembered being called SimReagan and which turns out to be slightly less funny, but still topical, all these years later.